


Another Story

by BlueColoredDreams



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Minor Violence, Spoilers up to ep.60, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-24 00:16:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10730265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: “I didn’t want to create the relics! But I was… I was overruled.”In which more than one thing is split into seven.





	Another Story

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a sort of extended discussion/speculation that got away from me during the conversation, and I decided, why not write it? Definitely gonna get shot to hell by canon but yolo.  
> Do magic visions count as psychological torture or just like??? general violence. I sure as fuck don't know.

She's struck with an obscene sense of nostalgia, looking down at it.

With it lying on the metallic polished dissection table, that shard of pure, flickering light, all pastels and milky white, as she’s shoulder to shoulder with Davenport and Merle, she could be at the Institute all over again.

It's too easy, she thinks. This time was too easy. She's so used to the struggle now, of long sleepless nights and hungry treks, and harried parlays that having it fall into their waiting hands scares her.

Her fingers tremble as her colleagues murmur about themselves. It's like being transported back a hundred years.

It's like she's a young woman all over again, the sense of something big pressing on her throat, only this time, it's not discovery she feels, but the end. It’s the end of everything, this time. And it was too easy to get their hands on the ignition.

She forces herself to pull her attention away from the Light, focusing on the hushed whispers around her.

“No one had gotten to it yet,” Magnus says. “The scouts were at least a day away.”

“We should do it now,” Barry mumbles. “As quick as we can.”

She's filled with horror; she hadn't realized they were serious. In the dark, under a foreign sky, their plans had seemed wistful and far less abhorrent. After all, it’s not the first time they’d talked about just giving up—but in the end, they always fought tooth and nail.  “ _No_!”

Everyone turns in shock. She hadn't realized how loud she'd been until she looks back at her friends. Her hands shake again, this time in anger at their aghast faces.

“No! This— how could you?!”

“Lucretia, please, I thought we had come to a consensus on this,” Davenport says, his hand light on her shoulder.

Lucretia shakes it off. She brandishes her journal, shaking it over the Light. It pulses as the pages pass over it, like it’s reacting to the information within. It makes her sick. All of this makes her sick-- she's sick of this dance, this chase and run and destroy. She wants to tear the Hunger at the seams, rip it apart piece by piece just like it's ripped so many worlds apart.

“We also know this is— this is the last chance! We have to—”

“We have to what? Die? I'm doing it on my terms. And maybe we'll stay dead this time. I’m taking this fucking light with me.”

Lucretia flinches back at the bitterness in Taako's voice. She looks to Lup, to see if it's startled her at all. Lup doesn't meet her gaze, eyes on Barry.

Lucretia isn’t sure what hurts her more, that she’s missed that the pain in her friends isn’t anything new, or that Lup won’t look her in the eye.

“If we do this, maybe it won't come to that,” Barry says.

“Or we could use the Light! Make a— a weapon or a shield, something to stop this, this cycle, to stop the Hunger once and for all,” she urges. “Don’t let it end like this.”

“Using this just calls it! You know that!” Barry reprimands. His voice is strident, admonishing. “Using that—that thing, it’s a call to the Hunger! Wanting to do more, it just feeds it!”

A hundred years ago, Lucretia might have stopped and listened. She might have held her composure, but she's seen so much and knows far more than she's able to even comprehend. She's died too many times, they all have; she would have thought that they would feel the same.

She has nightmares— they all do, but she's not like the others. She doesn't shake them off.

She hoards them and picks through them for understanding. The feeling of an arm hanging just by a tendon. The burn of a spell gone out of control. How it feels when you get crushed by a column of black tar, feeling it creep into the tree-like spread of her lungs. How intestines feel against the palm of her hand—hot, slick, rubbery and ridged— as she tries to push them back in for a friend's last ragged breaths. A hundred repositioning, queasy shifts in the fabric of time that rips her from surface to starboard. The fear that this time, maybe this time, the damage they sustained was too much to bring them back from.

Taking strange plants from Merle and foraging with Magnus. Staying up late with Lup and bolstering spells for Taako and carefully transcribing dissections for Barry. Helping fix the ship with Davenport and thousands and thousands of faces in a hundred and one lands that only exist for them and the scraps in the existential maw of a beast so all-encompassing it used to keep her up at night.

All of the fears and feelings and pains were clues, scraps of information the world has proffered up to them. If only they, too, could see. See that there’s a meaning to all of it, all the tired nights and broken bones.

“We have to make it count! All of that! All of it will be for— for nothing if we do this! We have to stand against it, this, the Hunger— all those worlds, all our homes... we have to make it count! You all, you were heroes! How could you just disrespect all those hopes that were placed on you, on... on us!”

“Now, Lucretia,” Merle says, playing the middleman once again. His voice sounds like he's playing the role like he's learned the lines from a play: His heart isn't in it. “I understand why you say that, but… this is, well this is what the rest of us decided. You have to understand—”

Lucretia looks down at him, head shaking. “No, why don’t you understand, this is—this is awful. How could you? The Light is a tool, to break it just because we don’t fully understand how to use it correctly against the Hunger… To break it and crawl away, what’s the worth in that? How does that make us heroes?”

Merle opens, then closes his mouth, at a loss for words. Lucretia’s chest aches—her throat is raw and tight, but she won’t cry, she won’t. But she can’t bear to see the look that crosses across Merle’s face as he fails to calm her. Frustration wells up inside of her like a flood, hot and painful.

The silence stretches on, anguished and awkward, until Magnus speaks.

“There are other things that are just as worthwhile.”

Lucretia looks at Magnus like he's a stranger standing in front of her. He looks just like he did the day they left. Black eye fading, coat unbuttoned, slightly ragged at the seams and dusty from his excursion out to the Light. But his shoulders slope and the edges of his mouth pinch with his brows. He looks old.

They all do, she realizes. All of them are closed off. They've decided.

“We're going to do it,” Taako says, scowling down at the table.

“Stand back, ‘Cretia,” Lup says quietly.

“Don't do this,” Lucretia begs, holding her hands up. “This is giving up; this can be used for so much...”

“Don't you get it?” Barry snaps. “We're tired! All of us!”

Lup puts a hand on his shoulder and he quiets, his jaw taut with anger.

Lucretia casts her eyes to each of them. Barry's tightly clenched teeth, Lup's eyes shifting from Barry to Taako, whose hair trembles against his neck as he shakes with controlled anger. Magnus, arms crossed and face tired; Merle, who gives her the minutest shake of his head.

Davenport, beside her, whose gaze is fixed on the Light, his carefully impassive face lit with its shifting hues.

“But,” she says softly. “To let it just... end.”

“This isn't— we're not some group of—what did you say? Heroes,” Taako snaps. “We never got that chance, to actually _be_ the heroes and be _done_ , and you know what? I'm tired of this. We've done everything.”

“We _haven't_ ,” she retorts.

“You're right,” he says. He plunges his hand forward, fingers glowing with a spell she doesn't immediately recognize. “We haven't done this.”

Lucretia shouts, but Davenport holds her back as Taako's hand sinks directly into the Light.

Her eyes burn as a light flashes through the room, bright white and hot. It sears her face and eyes; tears stream down her face, only to get burned off by the heat radiating from the space in front of her.

There's the sound of metal on metal and of a thousand anguished screams, and she feels herself crumple to the ground, hands clasped over her ears.

She's scared, for a minute that they're all dying, that they've made an even more grievous mistake and that in his haste, Taako had accidentally killed them all.

But with that one cacophonous wail, the world falls silent once again. Her ears ring as she presses her palms to her stinging eyes. Slowly, black spots begin to form, then fuzzy outlines of her colleagues. She blinks, but can’t resolve anything at all—just black and a bright-green white that hurts to focus on.

“Are you okay?”

Lucretia nods towards Davenport's voice, her hands outstretched until they brush against his shoulders.

Davenport calls out, “Everyone else? You guys all right?”

Maybe it's the tremble in his voice, or maybe it's the shock, but everyone murmurs an answer back, hands scrambling as they all crawl under the table like they have a thousand times before when the awful terror of it all is just too much to bear.

“Taako—Taako's unconscious—”

Lucretia huddles against her friends, Merle's arm slung against her shoulder and Lup solid against her back. Her shoulders shake against Lucretia’s spine.

“There’s a pulse,” Magnus says.

Lucretia draws her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them tightly. She closes her eyes tightly, bowing her head between her legs. An arm slinks between her back and Lup’s, solid and hot as it winds around Lup’s waist—Barry’s. A hand on her knee—Davenport. These things are all familiar to her, the tight wind of each other around the other in a pile of shaking limbs and quiet breaths.

The spots slowly bleed out from behind her eyelids, her face sore. She reaches out and back, fingers on Lup’s hip.

“What _was_ that?” Magnus finally asks.

Lucretia opens her eyes. The room around them is dark—the explosion, or implosion, or whatever had happened—had broken lights, test tubes, vials, everything. Shattered glass glitters in a shifting rainbow pattern, like water reflected on a ceiling. Something above them is glowing in those shifting hues.

Above their heads, the metal table feels warm. She shifts slowly, turning to look behind her at Magnus and Lup and Barry. Lup must have managed to turn him over and drag him with her, as Taako’s feet stick out from the protective shield of the tabletop, glass dusting his legs and boots, his head cradled in his sister’s lap. Blood shines bright on the hand he’d plunged towards the Light, but even as Lucretia’s stomach does an uncomfortable flip, he stirs, knees pulling up and shedding glass as he sits up.

“Guys,” he says in a rough voice, “Guys, I think I _died_.”

Lup’s head knocks against Lucretia’s shoulder as she throws it back into a rough laugh that might have been a sob.

“Damn,” Magnus swears, then dissolves into laughter.

Barry’s the next to laugh, then Merle and Davenport; Lucretia snorts, covering her face with her hands to stifle her next, loud peal of laughter.

“I died, and you laugh? See if I help any of you,” Taako grouses, scrubbing a hand across his mouth to wipe blood from his lips. “Not a single spell slot will be spent on any single one of you assholes. _Not_ that I have any juice for a while.”

There’s another round of laughter as Lup grabs Taako into an instant headlock, knuckles scrubbing into his hair as he bangs a fist against the floor.  

It’s like nothing has changed between the seven of them, and for a second, Lucretia thinks that the fight is diffused, that they can set aside the tension and anger and talk it out like they always do. There’s surely some middle ground that Merle and Davenport can help them all see, and they won’t have to go through with the plan.

She relaxes, hands falling from her smile as Lup shrieks in half-delight, half-indignation, as Taako starts prodding at her sides, making her squirm and grip him tighter. They scuffle for a few more seconds before Lup finally releases him.

If she could bottle time, she would—she would bottle up the moments like these and drink them in, let the relief and comfort soak into her bones as a taste of the best things she has. The best thing she has is her journals and her words, but she can never do it justice, never describe the pure warmth that soaks into her as they all trade hysterically relieved smiles in the dim rainbow light. The way it looks as the spectrum flickers like an aurora across their faces—Taako’s face bathed in it, washing the blood out to a dark smear across his nose and lips, knees sparkling from glass. The cast of shadows across Lup’s cheekbones and the shine of her teeth and the softness in Barry’s mouth as he smiles down at her. Magnus’s bemused laugh as he slaps Taako aside the shoulder and the relieved chuckles of Davenport and Merle.

She could write volumes upon volumes more about her friends, and in the coming years she pours herself over what she did manage to write, but the words never quite make the feeling out clearly. She loves them all so dearly that it’s an ache, a vice around her throat, all the words she’s written but never says; they’re all so incredibly brave and have done so much. Lucretia is proud of her friends, her heroes, horribly so; it's this pride that makes their current decision so deplorable.

She hopes that this shocks them out of the silly decision, this reckless abandon to hurtle towards death and take the entire universe with them.

The moment breaks just as suddenly as it is made:

Taako rises up onto his knees, leaning back out from under the table. “Woah, hey, it worked—I can’t fucking believe it, but it worked!”

Lucretia’s mouth tastes like ash.

One by one, they crawl out from under the table, unwinding arms from shoulders and waists and shaking out pins and needles. Glass digs into her palms as she crawls out. She stands with her back to the table, shivering with a sudden trepidation.

“What’s to say,” she says slowly, as the others wonder at the results of Taako’s spell, refusing to turn around.

She fixes her eyes on the fractured glass of a medicine cabinet, her face refracted back at her in large shards. Behind her, she sees six heads turn to her back, figures indistinct blurs in the shattered glass. She can feel their eyes on her like needles. She hasn’t felt like this in years, afraid to speak, fingers clasped together at her waist, attention hot against her neck. She lets the words tumble out, hesitant and calculating as her brain races to keep up with the feeling of dread in her gut.

“What’s to say,” she repeats. “That… this isn’t just another way of using the Light? That this won’t bring the Hunger, too?”

Behind her, Barry scoffs.

She turns, then. She lets the full scene soak into her—the six of them, gathered around the table. Their faces lit from below with shifting hues and sparks. Her fingers twitch, instinct to write all she sees, hears, gleans. All of it from the shattered equipment to the unreadable, shadowed expressions and the stubborn set of their shoulders. On the table, seven shards of light, small but just as bright, the colors flickering more rapidly than before. But she has no paper, no quill or pen or even her own blood to write with. What happens next will have to go unwritten.

“What?” she says, prompting Barry on.

“Look, we all know that you have some puffed up idea of our importance, that we’re some heroes to save everything as we know it, but we never—this isn’t what we signed up for,” Taako says suddenly.

“We signed up for anything! The mission’s protocol said we had to be prepared for anything—“

“Where the worst was death, Lucretia! Not some endless goose chase through all of existence, never dying for real, just reforming over and over and over and over—we have to do this.”

“This isn’t the spirit of the mission,” Lucretia says stubbornly.

“It is,” Davenport says quietly. “In the event of catastrophic failure, anything was authorized. _I’m_ authorizing it, Lucretia.”

“This could have failed horribly, it still can,” she protests. “Of all the things that we could do—”

“We’ve done it before,” Davenport says. “I was the one who told Taako how to do it. Of course, it was on a much smaller scale… It was before, of course, the team had been formed. But when we found the Light, originally, a small piece was broken away for testing. It can be reformed in case this fails.”

Lucretia gapes, “I—no one ever… Why wasn’t I informed of this?”

“It was before you were brought on as the chronicler,” Davenport answers. “Records were kept by the scientists at the Institute. It was… well, quite frankly, classified.”

Dumbstruck, she stands and watches the rest look down at the shards of light on the table. She feels lost, abandoned, ignored. Perhaps it’s a bit selfish, but she knows, deep down, that this cannot be the answer to their problems, that it’s just an escape.

“Lucretia,” Merle says quietly. “Just... come here, and  take it.”

She grits her teeth so hard she sees lights behind her eyes. “I don't want to,” she says angrily. “I think this idea is cowardly, idiotic, and dangerous.”

But she steps forward and reaches out anyway, and as one, they scoop the shards of the Light of Creation into their palms.

And it feels like the beginning of the end of the world, again.

The room seems to disintegrate around her; she hears something fuzzy in her ears, like someone speaking in the distance. As it grows in clarity, her teeth set on edge and her body tingles like it does when she accidentally brushes against the bond engine during repairs.

Shapes refocus, not into the med bay of the ship, but into verdant light and sparkling water, dark earth and flat rocks.

Her teammates surround her still, but in brighter focus, the red of Lup's cloak-turned-skirt almost too bright to see.

“So your problem with combat is protecting your hands, what you should do,” Lup's voice says, half an echoing memory, half not-exactly-Lup, like her voice is made up of parts of every single sound Lup has ever made. “Is fight with a ranged weapon. Staves are doubly useful for us, since we can use them to channel magic. Isn't that right, Mago, my man?”

Magnus shrugs, leaning on the thick wooden branch they'd procured from the underbrush. “You'd know more about that than I would. You ready, Lucretia?”

His voice echoes too, just like Lup’s, multilayered and somewhat awkward, the intonation on his words falling flat, like a poorly recorded message.

“I've done this before,” Lucretia says softly. “This happened before.”

Magnus continues on in the memory. “So you need to hold it this way, if you want to do any damage— that said, if you just swing it like a club you can take some heads off real nice.”

She feels something settle in her hands, a weight that's foreign but also familiar.

Lucretia looks down at her hands as her body positions itself reflexively. Rather than the rough bark of a tree branch like she trained with with Lup and Magnus after the hand to hand fiasco, she's holding a long, perfectly balanced staff of crystalline light. The opalescent colors flicker into patterns of wood grain, soft like driftwood.

 _‘Use me,’_ Magnus’ and Lup’s echoing voices say. But when Lucretia looks up, neither of their mouths match up to the words being spoken—Magnus still acts out the correct form for stave fighting, and Lup’s mouth curves into a leering grin as she laughs at something Magnus says.

 _'Like this,'_ the echoing voices say. _'Use me like this.'_

Her fingers curl into the light; it feels solid, like quartz, against her palms. It burns her fingers to hold it. As she squeezes, the staff flares into a brilliant blue, searing her palms to it. For all that it pains her to hold onto it, her fingers fit around its circumference like it was made for her—or was to be made for her, something about it feels unfinished.

 _'I can help you in your fight,'_ the echoes from inside the staff say. _'Make me into your weapon, your guidepost.’_

Lucretia has the fleeting thought that she should drop the staff, try to break the vision. But the heat against her flesh is so hot that her hands feel cold now, and she can see her skin start to blister around it. When she tries to release her grasp, there’s a tug as her skin, now melted to the crystal surface, pulls as the staff falls to the ground.

She stifles a sob, falling to her knees into the soft moss. It’s cold against her blazing fingers, each curl of moss illuminated from the light inside of the staff.

She can see her muscles start to show through, bright red, then a sickly white as the heat burns it away.

_‘Make me, I cannot be used like this. Make me, and I can save you. But if you make me whole, I can stop the storm from swallowing you whole.’_

Images flit through her head—a great tree, wide branches. Oak, white oak, strong and tall against a dark storm. Too strong to bend, and one by one, the branches creak and break, tumbling until all that’s left is the stripped trunk.

 _‘Us. Us. Us._ ’

“No,” she whispers, ripping her hands off of the staff. Pain spreads up her arms, so great that her senses feel dull, arms lead. There is no blood, but there is bone and a shiny white tendon as she lifts her hands into the air. “No. That will not be me.”

The Hunger’s storm will not break her down—she refuses.

The firmness in her voice surprises even herself, even though she wants to start screaming at the sight of her charred skin and cream-colored bones. She can count phalanges, each little off-white knob that had been seared gray by the energy put out by the crystalline staff.

“Use this,” Lup says, holding out a long branch of oak. “Use this instead.”

Lucretia reaches out with her ruined hands; the second the branch touches her deadened bones, her hands are whole again, painless and smooth. Whatever test she was going through had been passed.

She knows, instinctively, what to do. She puts everything into it, all of her desire to see her friends safe and happy, to protect the knowledge they’ve gathered, to stop the ceaseless cycle of death and destruction, and the Hunger—all of her desire to stop the Hunger from ever feasting ever again.

 “Use the staff like this,” Magnus says, “To push enemies away—”

She fixes those feelings into her head, and she lays the branch against the staff, and she pushes. The wood sinks into the light with little resistance.

Her fingers brush against the moss, and suddenly, she’s back in the med bay of the ship, her fingers curled around a white oak staff, it’s grain soft and worn with age and use.

_You’re right, Lucretia, the way to the death of the Hunger is not this way. Use me; use me as your means to your end._

She yanks her hands back, but the voice persists.

_Make me whole, make me whole again, and together, everything can be salvaged. It’s not the end, they’re wrong wrong wrong—_

She shakes, fingers curling against her thighs. The voice is no longer formless and echoing—it sounds like her own thoughts. She bites her lip, eyes closed tight against the noise. It rises in volume in her own head, as her own voice screams at her, her own dark thoughts.

_They’re all going to leave you, and you'll be all alone again, after all this time. You will be alone and you will die when the Hunger comes again. It will come regardless of how fractured my light is—so use me, and make me whole. Make me whole and you can keep them together, all safe. Without me, the storm will come and you will break, Lucretia._

“No, no, no,” she whispers, thinking back to the vision of the stripped oak the staff had shown her. “This is not me. Not me.”

And just as suddenly as it began, the echoes stop. She pants, lungs struggling as she tries to keep herself from heaving onto the floor. Blood trickles down her chin from her teeth on her lip and drips onto her hands as she stares down at the staff.

It’s so simple.

It’s hard to believe it is something that was made from the light that painted all the words in the entire world, all the flowers and beautiful deadly things she’s ever seen. It's just a staff.

Trembling, she reaches out and touches a single finger to the grain. She feels the magic power of it surge through her body like a second pulse. A murmuring fills her ears, but it sounds more like wing beats than her own voice. A conversation from two rooms away, the white noise of the cafeteria in the Institute’s halls.

She tries to stand, but finds her legs will not support her. She grips the staff with both hands, fingers tight against the wood as she lifts it upright. It’s heavy, but easily moved, just as perfectly balanced as it was in her vision. If she closes her eyes, she can imagine that she can see it glow behind her eyelids, a fire of bright white light that sparks an occasional rainbow. There’s a knot of wood at the top, and in her mind, it burns the brightest, the concentration of magic that beats out the pulse against her hands.

The Light, she knew, was sentient. It seems that this… artifact she’d made is the same. She pushes the disgust and recoil from her mind and stands, leaning against the staff as her knees shake.

She can’t catch her breath, a battle between panic and training to settle herself. When she opens her eyes, breath still uneven, but not the hysterical gasps, she finds her friends in various states of broken-down and terror-filled fugues.

Beside her, Davenport’s fingers are frozen around his own shard, light spilling out between laced fingers, eyes shut tight. Merle is two steps away, arms outstretched, the light pulled like taffy between his hands.

Taako’s hands are cupped near his mouth, face poised like he was about to blow onto the tiny pinprick of light balanced between them. Magnus’s hands are moving without him looking, eyes closed and brows furrowed tightly; Barry’s hands are outstretched and his shard floats above them, roiling like boiling water.

Lup stirs and gives a cry, hand reaching out to nothing in particular. Her shard covers her hand like a glove, and as Lucretia watches in fascinated horror, it settles and morphs into a metal gauntlet on Lup’s outstretched hand.

Lup falls onto all fours, panting. When she rises seconds later, sweat and tears shine on her face. She looks up and then laughs, “Well. That was… something.”

Lucretia laughs uncertainly, slumping against the staff. “Sure was,” she agrees.

Lup raises her palm and fire dances out from the gauntlet, forming spiral patters around her arm. She lifts it higher, and small flames like fireflies rain down around them. “Hmph. Not bad.”

“Is that—is that safe?”

“Safe as anything,” Lup says noncommittally, eyes lit by the sparks. “It wants to be used, in any case.”

“It… spoke to you too?” Lucretia asks. A spark lands on her staff, and it jolts in her hands, growing warm. She feels it tug upwards, like a dog on a leash that wants to play. She raises the staff slightly, then taps it to the ground.

Blue white sparks circle out from her feet, lighting up the shattered glass. Lup laughs and twirls her hand, making patterns in the air. Lucretia tentatively taps the staff against the ground again, biting back a small smile as the shards dance up into the air, sparkling with white fire as they twirl with the streams of Lup’s fire.

“It did,” Lup answers. Beside her, Taako starts to move, mouthing words that no one hears. The light contracts in his hands and solidifies. “But I don’t give a shit about what the voices in my head say anymore, so I just ignored it.”

The glittering glass fades and softens into something soft and green. Green vines snake against the tiled floor and Merle murmurs to himself, now holding a green sash between his fingers.

“I feel like I underpreformed here,” Taako complains, turning a small pebble between his fingers. Merles’ vines turn into gemstone droplets, catching and refracting the light from Lup’s fire.

Lup snickers, “And I would have thought you’d have overcompensated.”

Lucretia snorts as the two begin to bicker between themselves; she turns away from them, watching as the rest of her teammates rouse from their trances. Davenport holds a monocle between his fingers, squinting up at it. Barry holds a bell that he muffles with his fingers between the clapper, shaking his head mutely when Lup urges him to ring it.

Magnus is last, with a chalice cradled in his hands, face white and sweaty. The look of panic on his face pauses their playing, and the second he holds it out, Lucretia feels her staff tug again, more insistent.

It grows hot in her hand and the white-noise murmuring turns into a roar. She sees Lup hastily pull her hand back behind her back, fingers clenched. Taako’s pebble shudders in his hand, and a very quiet chime sounds between Barry’s fingers. Vines creep towards Magnus and he steps back until his back presses against a cabinet.

“It—it wants to, it can change time,” Magnus says quickly. “It wants to go back, we—these are going to have to be kept separate.”

Everyone is so unaccustomed to absolute terror in Magnus’ voice that they dully nod. Lucretia tightens her grip on her staff, mouth pursed in worry. She can only guess what it was, but for something to scare Magnus, it must have been a terrible thing the Light showed him, more terrible than even the Hunger.

“We have to keep them apart,” Magnus repeats. “Or the Light—it will try to reform itself.”

Lucretia inhales sharply, but is cut off by Barry:

“Don’t you dare say it,” he snaps, “Don’t say it; we all know what you’re thinking.”

“Barry!” Lup admonishes softly, reaching out to pop his elbow with her bare hand.

“No,” Barry retorts quickly. “This is it; this is how we have to do it! We all just used our own pieces, even you Lucretia, and no—no eyes, no sign that it acknowledged the Light was used—this is _it_ , and I’m _not_ putting these things back together, just because it wants it! We all want things, but do we get them? No!”

“Then what follows,” Davenport says quietly, “Is that we have to hide these things away. What I say we do is this: we separate, hide away our artifacts—or keep them with you; I don’t think it matters as long as all seven are not together, since nothing happened until Magnus came to… And go our own ways.”

“I’m going to stay with the ship,” Lucretia says. “I don’t think it’s safe—”

“I’m going,” Taako says suddenly. “I’m good, I’m out. O-U-T out.”

“We go our own ways,” Davenport says over Taako, “But return in one year’s time. Use the standard time markers of the Institute, not of this world. Stay in touch. Anything strange, report it immediately and come back to our current location. Flag any signs of the Hunger, any extraordinary technology, vanishing constellations—I want standard procedure all the way. I don’t think it’s necessary, but just in case. Stay in at least pairs if possible; Lup, Barry—I assume you’ll be going with Taako?”

“Yes, I—Barry?” Lup says, glancing between her brother and Barry.

“Yeah. I’m with you two. Like old times.”

“Lup, stay in communication with Lucretia. Magnus, stay in contact with me. Merle?”

“I’ll go out with Magnus, I guess,” Merle says slowly. “’M not too big of a fan of this, I gotta say.”

“I’m not either, my friend,” Davenport says, turning the monocle between his fingers. “I have to stay here myself, so Lucretia and I will be here if you need us. We’ll continue our research on this world, the Hunger, and the beast… And I suppose, we’ll research the Light as it manifests as these artifacts.”

When Davenport speaks like this, it’s easy to fall back into ranks, to close her eyes and pretend it’s day one again, pretend like these people aren’t her family, that she’s not filled with bone-shaking fear and doubt and anger with these people she’s lived and died with for the past one hundred years. They are a crew, a loosely assembled team of people who have run simulations together and gone bar hopping once or twice, and their captain has issued orders.

And so they follow them.

She is not thinking of defying those orders, of betraying those friends, of the growing bitterness in the back of her dry mouth as one by one, they file out.

When Merle hugs her tight, when Taako bumps fists with her, his eyes distant, or when Lup grabs her arms and nods shortly, tapping the pendant on her throat with a grin, she is not thinking about how she knows they are wrong. How they must know it too, how tangled they all are. There are no thoughts in her head, but when Barry brushes past her without a word, a righteous desire to prove herself swells behind her ribs.

She wants to shake him, shake them all out of this stupor they’re in—don’t they know she feels it too? She knows, she’s tired too, but she wants to end it properly, not slink off into the sunset with her tail between her legs.

Magnus leaves last, pack slung over one shoulder and cup clipped to his belt. He claps Davenport’s shoulder. “Me and Merle promise not to get separated this time, absolutely _promise_ , Capt’n.”

“Be safe out there, big guy. _Don’t_ fight anything bigger than you,” he warns.

Magnus laughs, “Hey now!”

Lucretia doesn't pay much attention to their idle chat, eyes fixed on the receding backs of her friends.

Magnus claps her shoulder, gripping it tight. Like Taako, his eyes are distant too, trained off into the horizon with the same tired lines on his face.

“You’ll see, Lu, this… well,” he says softly.  “It’s something we have to live with, but being a hero is more than just fighting until you’re dead. Maybe we can go out and do some good with these things.”

“But you’re afraid of it,” Lucretia whispers back.

“Yeah. It scares the shit out of me,” Magnus admits. “That doesn't necessarily mean it can't be used for good. But, well… It’s a tempting thing. Wouldn’t you want to go back, before we set out and told everyone back home, all those people, and stop them? But what good would it do, do you think? Would it stop the Hunger? Would everyone die, knowing that it’s coming?”

He stops and looks down at her, squeezing her shoulder again as he beams. “And if we did that, well, would all of us even have gotten close?”

He pats her once and shoulders his pack up higher onto his back. “Don’t worry, Lu, we always do come back in the end, you know?”

“Yeah,” she says, holding her hand over her pendant. “Yeah, we all do.”

 

* * *

 

And they do come back, in the end. Eight years, five days, and many many losses later, they come back, all but one.

But so does the Hunger. 


End file.
